February 27, 2009

IT’S COLD AND RAINY, but the Tea Party pictures are coming in via cellphone already. Here are a couple.

From Atlanta, where a reported 300-400 showed up, a flag with protest babes:

From Chicago:

More Chicago pictures here. Plus this summary: “The Chicago Tea Party was an unqualified success. I’m not an expert at judging crowd sizes, but there could’ve been as many as 500 to 1000 people there. In cold weather, in the middle of February, without paid organizers like the left has.”

Plus Bill Rickords emails from Wichita, Kansas: “About 3-400 folks showed up in 25 degree weather. Don’t know what these things would be in Spring weather. But we had a pig show up anyway.” I thought they were all in D.C.!

And Bradley Ems emails from St. Louis: “I don’t know if you’ve gotten any pictures from St. Louis (I’m too swamped at work to have attended), but KMOX just reported that the tea party here was expected to draw a small group of 50…over 1,000 showed up. There is something brwing in the
heartland.”

And Joe Fairbanks emails from Oklahoma City: “I’ll be sending you pictures from the ‘Tea Party’ in Oklahoma City soon. I wanted to let you know that we had an amazing turnout of 400 people. This is amazing for multiple reasons, but mostly because this rally was organized in less than 48 hours and it took place at 11 am and the temperature was below freezing with the wind blowing quite strongly. Simply put: people are mad as hell. Obama and Congress won’t be able to ignore this anger much longer if they hope to survive 2010 or 2012. I can also tell you the crowd did take a lot of pride in the fact that our Senators, Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe, are two of the leaders against all this irresponsible spending. I’ll get those pictures to you as soon as I get them back.”

UPDATE: Reader Trish Elam sends this news report on Atlanta from WXIA TV. I’m in the car and don’t have a good enough connection to play it, but I’m passing it along FYI.

Plus, reader Michael Bassham reports from the Nashville event: “Weather was cold and drizzly. Attendance, in my estimation, was about 300.” Plus, a pic:

And a reader who requests anonymity writes from Tulsa: “Surely someone will send you a better pic than this one, but wanted to make sure you had at least something from Tulsa’s event, where I’d say about 200 or so turned out on a very cold day.”

And, via email, some thoughts from human-rights blogger Robert Mayer:

I just want to offer you and the tea party protesters some words of encouragement. As someone who has studied (and blogged) protest as an act of democratic revolution and people power in the post-Soviet area, I know a lot about the dynamics of mass civil society unrest, government transition, etc…

What we are seeing now is truly huge POTENTIAL for massive civil unrest against the American government gone lunatic with spending. Realistically, 400-1000 people at a protest, even at a dozen protests across the country, will do nothing to change the minds of our idiot leaders.

However, it creates the POTENTIAL that each protest could have a million. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine did not start out with two million people camping in tents in downtown Kiev. It started with only a few hundred diehard activists.

Conservatives and libertarians have never had a strong activist base, but this appears to be the time to start. They need to capture today’s momentum and hold bigger and bigger protests every week. Use technology to organize and move and grow the movement. Compared to other countries, the United States is huge. Don’t aim for a massive march on D.C. (at least, until you have a few million going). Focus the protests locally, on state policians and state capitols.

In any case, this is simply an email of encouragement to you guys. You just have to stay determined and keep people focused and believing. You’d be surprised. Within a month you could go from 500 to 50,000.

Well, it’s broken a thousand already, reportedly, and in not much more than a week.

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